Through dazzling beadwork, a mixed-media art exhibit in Palm Beach County celebrates African Yoruba heritage and family traditions from a rising Nigerian star in global contemporary art.
Multimedia artist Modupeola Fadugba, who is most notably known for her colorful and monochromatic paintings of synchronized swimmers, tries to capture the “togetherness and a synchronicity,” in everyday life, she told WLRN.
Her first West Palm Beach exhibit marks a subtle shift from swimmers.
Fadugba’s new exhibit — “Also, What Are We Wearing?” — at the Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery in West Palm Beach spotlights Nigeria’s Ojude Oba cultural festival, which features Africans parading in coordinated attire accompanied by drummers, dancers, and horses in the Ijebu-Ode, Ogun State of Nigeria.
“ I find a similar aesthetics and movement in this festival where groups are wearing the same thing,” Fadugba’s told WLRN. Festival participants, moving and dancing in rhythm, often wear prestigious clothing made from Aso Oke, a traditional, handwoven striped fabric created by the Yoruba people of southwestern Nigeria.
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“I've attended the festival. It is chaotic,” said Fadugba, who was born in Lomé, Togo to Nigerian diplomats. “So the pictures are more organized than the actual event itself, which I find really fascinating that behind something so organized and so ordered, there's actually a lot of disorder happening in reality.”
Fadugba, who has an academic background in chemical engineering and economics from the University of Delaware, as well as a master's in education from Harvard University, was recently featured on the New York Time’s list of top rising contemporary artists.
She’s part of a new wave of international interest in African music, fashion, and art. She said her interest often center around the synchronicity of chaos and organization.
Fadugba spent time working closely with artisans, tailors, beadworkers, saddle makers across West and East Africa, learning not just how their objects are created, but how each craft carries history, identity, and a sense of place.
“ I think maybe 75% of the works have some form of beating,” she said.
Her intricately beaded saddles and horses, floating on mottled canvas, are part of an ever-evolving creative process that began decades ago in her teenage years and honors the stories behind these West and East African traditions.
“ I started working with beaters in Tanzania as a teenager. So I would shadow these Messiah women,” she said. “Although beating culture and beating aesthetics is really core to Yoruba aesthetics as well, my introduction actually to beating comes from East Africa and more precisely from the Maasai women of Tanzania and more specifically Arusha," a city in Tanzania which borders Kenya.
Her artwork and beadwork are labor-intensive, involving complex techniques and experimentation with stitching and various kinds of glue. But it's the collaboration between African cultures that keeps everything intact.
“ And so there's a lot of sort of invisible contributions and that's why it's nice to have these discussions because an artist doesn't work on their own as well. There's a lot of help. There's a lot of mentorship, there's a lot of teaching, there's a lot of mistakes," she said.
“I call it my Museum of Mistakes. When you look at the beating works that never made it over time.”
Fadugba describes the creative process as “an algorithm,” a set of steps used to solve a problem.
”So this play between flow and intuition, but then order and process,” she said. “That's always something that I grapple with in my works and that comes to bear quite visibly in this body of work and in in the festival itself.”
IF YOU GO
What: "Also, What Are We Wearing?" exhibit
When: Runs through November 29
Where: Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery: 2414 Florida Ave, West Palm Beach, FL 334011
Learn more here.
